The Quiet Revolution, From There’s a Riot Goin’ On to Black Messiah
Both artists, across eras, translate collapse into communion. They show that when utopias fall apart, music can offer refuge; when slogans lose their power, groove can carry the weight of protest.
When Sly Stone dismantled his own utopia with There’s a Riot Goin’ On, he redefined what Black freedom could sound like—murky, interior, and unwilling to perform joy. Forty-three years later, D’Angelo reached for that same uneasy frequency on Black Messiah, translating political dread into groove until conviction became its own kind of prayer.
Both albums arrived when the streets were burning and promises had curdled. Sly recorded during escalated drug use and intra-group tension from 1970 to 1971, as the civil rights movement declined and Black Power rose. D’Angelo originally planned a 2015 release, but the Ferguson and Eric Garner case decisions pushed him to drop the album earlier. Each artist confronted the exhaustion of a generation that believed things might change, then watched that belief turn to ash. What blossomed wasn’t despair exactly, it was something more unsettling, a refusal to lie about what freedom costs when you’re living inside its failure.
The sound itself became the message. Sly worked mostly alone throughout 1970 and 1971, recording many vocals in his bedroom with a wireless microphone and a drum machine driving the beat. D’Angelo pursued an entirely analog, murky funk sound, earning comparisons to the 1971 Sly & the Family Stone album. Both men built sonic worlds where the polish itself would be a betrayal—where only texture that caught and dragged could carry the weight of what needed saying.
Isolation vs. Communion
Stone worked mostly by himself, recording vocals in his bedroom with other members later overdubbing their parts, then Stone overdubbing even more on top. The result was music that sounded like it had been filtered through layers of suspicion. Stone hired streetwise friends as personal managers who enlisted gangsters and Mafiosos as bodyguards, assigned to handle his business and protect him from those he considered enemies, including his own bandmates. You can hear that paranoia embedded in every track, the way the mix was so thick and muddy it perfectly suited the album’s themes of disillusionment and despair.
The Maestro Rhythm King drum machine became Sly’s primary collaborator—an instrument that couldn’t betray him, couldn’t demand anything, couldn’t leave. Greg Errico grudgingly testified that Stone took the Maestro’s ticky-tacky Holiday Inn lounge texture and inverted it, turned it inside out into something the ear wasn’t used to. On “Family Affair,” that rigid pulse doesn’t swing so much as trudge, a heartbeat slowed by chemistry and disappointment. Engineering consultant Richard Tilles edited the rhythm box to sound like a heartbeat while muting most of Sly’s guitar parts and emphasizing Billy Preston’s electric piano. The song drags its feet through simple truths about blood being thicker than mud, about loving people you can’t stay with and can’t leave.
D’Angelo’s isolation was different—chosen, protective, a decade-plus retreat from a world that wanted his body more than his vision. But when he finally arrived, he didn’t arrive alone. The Vanguard comprised drummer Chris Dave, bassist Pino Palladino, guitarists Jesse Johnson and Isaiah Sharkey, vocalist Kendra Foster, and keyboardist Cleo “Pookie” Sample. When D’Angelo got together with Pino Palladino, Questlove, and D, something magical always happened—‘Another Life’, ‘Tutu’, and ‘The Charade’ were all live takes. This wasn’t the fractured solitude of Riot; it was communion forged in the recognition that false unity—the “we are family” optimism of Stand!—had failed.
Yet Black Messiah carries its own exhaustions. About 70 percent wasn’t done quite as live as Voodoo, with many solitary times where it would just be D’Angelo and engineer Russell Elevado. D’Angelo was a perfectionist, and with cocaine and alcohol problems culminating in a 2005 car crash, the album took fourteen years. The warmth in the ensemble playing exists alongside sonic murk, voices half-submerged in reverb and Leslie cabinets, like watching people through frosted glass. The band breathes together, but nobody’s pretending it’s easy.
Where Sly recorded his paranoia, D’Angelo recorded his return to trust. But both albums understand that real community—the kind that doesn’t dissolve when the high wears off—requires acknowledging how much was broken first.
The Sound of Disillusion
Listen to how “Family Affair” refuses to move. The static, unearthly sounds of the Maestro Rhythm King created a very specific mood—totally unlike a drummer playing a real kit, staunchly synthetic, making a substantial contribution to the dark, compressed, and paranoid mood. That mechanized pulse sits there like a fact you can’t argue with, while Preston’s electric piano circles in slow, narcotic figures. Sly’s voice barely rises above a mutter, Rose Stone answering him in the same defeated register. The arrangement is skeletal, but the mix is suffocating—the result was a mix so thick and muddy that it perfectly suited the album’s themes. Every element has been recorded over, taped over, compressed until the sound itself became claustrophobic.
“Africa Talks to You” shows what happens when funk turns inward and starts eating itself. Led by proto-drum machine sounds, a sinewy bass line from Larry Graham, and stinging guitar work from Freddie Stone, it’s one of the more striking mood pieces, with an almost jazzy lounge groove. But that groove doesn’t release tension—it compounds it. The bass moves like something trying to escape quicksand, each note landing heavy and deliberate. The rigidity provided by a drum machine could provide a tight center around which sounds could be languidly arranged, and the playing could lurch and stumble. Everything lurches and stumbles here, the wah-guitar stuttering, the vocal asides barely decipherable. It’s murky, dark, slightly disturbing—funk heard from three in the morning when you’re too wired to sleep and too exhausted to think straight.
D’Angelo understood that murk intimately. The album was produced and mostly written by D’Angelo, recorded, processed, and mixed using analog equipment to capture vintage funk and soul sounds. But this wasn’t nostalgic retrieval—it was strategic obscurity. Russell Elevado insisted analogue sounds better, hating mixing in-the-box, with all the great albums he’s done mixed on an SSL using SSL automation. The decision to refuse digital plugins wasn’t about purity. It was about texture, about sounds that fray and bleed and distort in ways that feel human precisely because they’re imperfect.
“The Charade” makes that aesthetic choice political. D’Angelo went hard on guitar and keys with Questlove brilliant on drums, while Pino’s bass brought amazing chords over the hooks, melodic throughout. The track struts like Prince but with all the sheen sanded off. The final Pro Tools session totalled 63 audio tracks, including 13 drum tracks with several drum effect print tracks, nine clap tracks, 4 MPC2000 tracks, 3 bass tracks, and multiple guitar and keyboard tracks. All that layering doesn’t create transparency—it creates depth that swallows light. The bass fractures into harmonic overtones, the drums sound like they’re being played in an adjacent room, D’Angelo’s voice smeared across the stereo field. There were tons of processing on the drums with compression and reverbs, treating D’Angelo’s vocals with more reverbs, echoes, and processing effects like chorusing and running through a Leslie cabinet.
When he sings about being outlined in chalk after walking a million miles, the production doesn’t dramatize that violence—it internalizes it. The chaos and claustrophobia live inside the sound itself, in the way nothing quite locks into place, everything slightly off-center. Both albums refuse the listener the comfort of clarity. Disillusionment here isn’t a concept to examine from outside, but the weather you’re standing in.
Faith in Ruin
The genius of There’s a Riot Goin’ On and Black Messiah is how they make imperfection non-negotiable. Not sloppiness—precision about wrongness. If you knew about the former record, it’s described as not about dancing to the music in the streets but about disintegration, getting messed up, nodding, maybe dying, with no peaks, no emphasis, little movement, falling away like a landslide in a dream. That falling away is deliberate, structural. The slowed tempos, the drugged pacing, the way vocals slur into syllables you have to strain to catch—these aren’t accidents of production. They’re testimonies about what consciousness feels like when history keeps breaking its promises.
On “Brave & Strong,” Sly declares, “Out and down, ain’t got a friend,” and you sadly tend to believe him. The track uses both drum machine and live drums, depending on how complex the rhythm needs to be; this hybrid approach creates a double vision. Nothing settles. The human and mechanical don’t merge cleanly—they coexist in friction. That friction is the point. The fact that a rich man who had the adoration of millions could feel so hopeless and alienated was striking in its very notion at the time. The album’s final track, “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa,” takes the 1969 hit “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and slows it until celebration becomes elegy. The result is described as perhaps the most frightening recording from the dawn of the 1970s, capturing all the drama, ennui, and hedonism of the decade to come with almost a clairvoyant feel. Seven minutes of funk as funeral march, bass and drums dragging through mud while Sly mumbles gratitude that sounds like exhaustion.
D’Angelo learned from that fearlessness about failure. He wrote in the album notes that it’s about people rising up in Ferguson and Egypt and Occupy Wall Street, everywhere a community has had enough and decides to make change happen, not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them. That collectivist vision shapes how the album sounds—loose where it could be tight, sprawling where it could be contained. The sprawl is generosity, making room for other voices, other instruments, other rhythms to breathe. Everything hit tape at one point or another, with any jams with two or more people always recorded to tape, and all of D’Angelo’s vocals were recorded to tape. Tape captures accidents. It holds onto the moment when someone came in slightly early or the vocal take that cracked in the right spot.
“Another Life” proves that faith in the moment. They came up with it in literally three hours out of thin air, never editing the song, with the arrangement heard being a live take. Three hours to channel something after fourteen years of waiting—that’s not a contradiction, that’s compression. All those years of woodshedding, all that analog equipment laboriously set up and maintained, it was preparation for letting go. For trusting that when the band locked in, the imperfections would be the parts that mattered most.
Both albums turn the studio into a sanctuary, not by making it safe but by making it honest. Michael Brown was six years old when D’Angelo began recording, and twelve years later, Brown’s shooting by police in Ferguson triggered the album’s release. D’Angelo told his tour manager, Alan Leeds, after the verdict: “The one way I do speak out is through music. I want to speak out.” That need to speak finds form in rhythms that won’t resolve, in bass lines that circle back on themselves, in voices that hide and reveal in the same breath.
Sly and D’Angelo both understood something crucial: When the revolution fails, when the dream defers past recognition, when you’re too tired to perform hope—that’s when you need music that tells the truth about being broken. Not broken in a way that’s picturesque or redemptive. Broken in a way that drags, that resists forward motion, that makes you sit inside the uncomfortable present tense.
The drag itself becomes resistance. The murk becomes clarity about what it costs to keep believing when belief should be dead. The imperfection becomes moral stance—a refusal to manufacture coherence when the world offers none. These albums don’t solve anything. They testify. They make monuments out of exhaustion, cathedrals out of funk that barely wants to move. And in that exhausted groove, in that bedroom paranoia and that analog warmth fighting through decades of compression, they locate something that sounds remarkably like freedom—not the kind that dances, but the kind that breathes, barely, and keeps breathing anyway.